Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I again thank Senator Ruston for her extremely important question, because the damage done to this program is very concerning. I can confirm for the senator reports that the Commonwealth Jobs, Education and Training Child Care Fee Assistance Program has been subject to very significant exploitation in recent years by what is a small but, unfortunately, expanding network of family day-care services and in some cases parents who are engaging in what is known in the business as sharp practices.

Those sorts of practices have included services which have charged excessive fees; a number have been found to have been charging fees upwards of $20 to $30 an hour; services claiming for hours of care which were actually not delivered—that is, a number of family day-care services charging the JET parents in this case for 12-hour blocks of care per day despite the child only being in care for a few hours; parents actually claiming more child care than they need to complete their own study or training commitments; some JET parents who are placing their children in care over 50 hours a week, which is of course fully subsidised by taxpayers except for the 50c per hour per child co-contribution, even in cases where their courses only required a 10- or 20-hour per week study commitment; and parents who have continued to claim the same sort of assistance, despite no longer participating in or having actually completed their study or training.

As a result of those practices, government spending on the program blew out by around $28 million under the previous government in 2012-13 and again the year after that, despite the number of families and children accessing the program actually declining over the same period. The expectation was that the program would blow out a further $240 million over the next four years to 2017-18 without the government taking some action.

I think much of the blow-out has been driven by the ability of services and parents to make claims which are completely uncapped. (Time expired)